The Crowstarver (8 page)

The first week after Spider came off Slimer's, Percy put him with his father. But Tom soon found that there was not a lot that Spider could do to help him at that time of year, comparatively slack from a shepherd's viewpoint. More, Tom, in making the rounds of his sheep, had to accommodate his long stride to the boy's plod, or else Spider would become breathless. He noted though that, whereas the flock would bunch or run before him or the dog, they seemed to treat Spider as an honorary sheep, and would stand quiet and allow him to walk in among them and even to stroke individual animals.

‘He might be some use to me come lambing,' Tom said to Percy, ‘but not right now.'

‘I'll give him a week up with Stan,' said the foreman.

‘I don't think he'll be strong enough to help shift they fold units,' said Tom.

‘Well, he can help collect the eggs,' said Percy.

So Spider rode up with Stan Ogle in his little rubber-tyred tub-cart loaded with chicken-feed
and pulled by Pony. But he was indeed not strong enough to help in moving the heavy folds to fresh ground each morning, and only got in the way of Red and Rhode as they helped their father. The Ogle boys were not particularly kindhearted, and they made sly jokes about Spider which he did not understand, and laughed at him.

Stan Ogle did, on Percy's instructions, allow Spider to give a hand in collecting the eggs from his huge flock of hens, but not before he'd given the boy a stern warning about possible breakages. This meant that Spider picked up each egg with such painful care that it took him an age to clear one nest-box, and then, to cap it all, he tripped, carrying a full tray of eggs, and smashed the lot.

‘Send un somewheres else, Percy, for the Lord's sake,' said the poultryman after a few days.

So next morning, after the rest had left the stables, the foreman said to Spider ‘How'd you like to stop in here today? You like the horses, don't you?'

Spider nodded.

‘Good uns,' he said softly.

‘Well, you bide here along of Ephraim and he'll find you summat to do.'

The horseman gave Spider a long-handled
four-tined fork – four-grain prong a Wiltshire-man would call it – and told him to muck out Pony's empty stall, but he could soon see that the boy was not able to handle the implement properly but perfectly capable of doing himself an injury. Because of his clumsy way of getting about and the enthusiasm with which he drove his fork into the straw, Ephraim could see it was only a matter of time before he should spear himself through the foot.

‘Leave that for now, Spider,' he said, and he took him down to the far end of the long cobbled stables.

Here, hung upon pegs in the wall, was all the tack for the work horses – the big straw-stuffed headcollars, the slim brass hames that fitted round those collars, the reins, the blinkered headpieces, the heavy ridged saddles, the breechings, the girths. There were in all eight sets, of varying sizes, for Flower the shire mare, for the two retired heavyweight hunters Em'ly and Jack, for the four hairy-heeled carthorses of doubtful breeding – halfway horses, Ephraim called them – and for the pony, Pony.

All this saddlery had to be kept clean and in good working order, Ephraim knew only too well, for it was he who had to do it all, apart from
some occasional help from his son Albie and now that was no longer forthcoming.

All the brasswork – the hames, all the rings and buckles of the harness, the metal plates set in the saddles – had to be burnished. All the leather parts of the saddlery had to be kept supple, with saddle soap and wax polish. Ephraim took down a pair of hames, slender and curved, with a little brass ball on the tip of each, and from a shelf he took a tin of Brasso and some cloths. He sat down on a bench and beckoned Spider to sit beside him.

‘Now watch me,' he said, and he shook some Brasso onto a cloth and began to rub it into a short length of the metal with little circular motions. Then he took a clean cloth and buffed the metal till it shone.‘Reckon you could do that, Spider?' he asked.

Spider nodded eagerly.

‘You got to keep on doing that, all over theseyer hames, till the pair of 'em is shining bright. Take your time. I'll be down the other end mucking out, if you wants me.'

Spider did indeed take his time. He was painfully slow, partly because of his innate clumsiness, partly because he was obviously determined to do the job well. And he did.

At the end of the week, the horseman took Percy Pound to show him the shining brasswork and well-polished leather of one of the eight sets of saddlery.‘Guess who done that, Percy,' he said.

The foreman looked at Spider.‘Did you do that?' he said.

Spider gave his lopsided grin, nodding his head a great many times and hopping from foot to foot.

‘Good boy!' said Percy, and he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a sixpence.

‘Here,' he said.‘Get yourself a few extra allsorts.'

‘Took him two days to do that one set,' said Ephraim, ‘but he kept on steady.'

‘I'll leave him with you for the time being then, Eph,' said Percy.

‘Even at this rate, he'll have done all my tack in a couple of weeks,' said the horseman.‘That'll be a real help to me. T'was never my favourite job.'

‘Don't drive him too hard, mind,' said Percy.‘He's only a kid after all. Give him the afternoon off, now and again.'

So one day the following week Ephraim said to Spider at midday,‘Well done, boy. Now then, you can have the rest of the day off.'

Seeing that Spider did not understand, the horseman took him by the shoulders, propelled him towards the stable door, and said,‘Off you go, there's a good lad. Have a little holiday.'

‘Where go?' Spider said.

‘Why, to your house of course,' said Ephraim, meaning to Tom's cottage.

‘Spider's house?'

‘That's right.'

So Spider set off. He did not know why he was going but he knew where he had to go, so up the drove he went and off across the fields to the spinney that lay between Maggs' Corner and Slimer's, and so to his house, as he'd been told.

He pulled aside the flap and went and sat on the box and got out his lunch and began happily eating. For a moment he thought about his fox, but did not worry at not seeing it, especially as a robin now appeared on the ground in front of the shelter. Spider particularly liked robins, and he threw out some crumbs.

‘Tic-tic-tic-tic,' he called softly.‘Tssip! Tseee!' and the robin, intrigued at hearing its own voice, hopped nearer. Soon a large number of other small birds appeared on the ground outside Spider's house – sparrows, chaffinches, dunnocks, tomtits, and what he always called a
‘birdblack', and between them they accounted for a large part of Spider's lunch. All of them showed no sign of fear of the boy, but all of them disappeared in a hurry when a big carrion crow dropped down.

Perhaps because it was alone, perhaps because it was not stealing corn and only croaks that did that were bad, Spider did not think of trying to frighten it away. Instead, he spoke to it in its own tongue.

‘Kraa!' said Spider, realistically hoarsely for his own voice was beginning to break, and ‘Kraa!' the crow replied.

Spider threw it his last crust, and it took it in its strong bill and flew up into the trees above.

Spider was very hungry that evening.

‘I don't reckon I'm giving you enough for your lunch,' said Kathie.‘Growing boy like you.'

‘Birds!' said Spider with his mouth full, and then he swallowed and illustrated his meaning by giving some bird calls, the robin's, the ‘cheep' of sparrows and the ‘tseep, tseep' of the dunnock, and the unmistakable song of the cock chaffinch, a cascade of a dozen notes ending in a loud ‘choo-ee-o!' At the same time, he mimed the throwing of bits of food.

‘Giving half his lunch to the birds!' said
Kathie to Tom.‘I might have known.'

Tom went down to the pub that evening (it had always pleased him that his local should be called The Lamb) for a glass or two of the rough cider that most of the farm men drank, and there, by chance, met Ephraim Stanhope.

‘Evening, Eph,' he said.‘Do us a favour, will you?'

‘What's that?' asked the horseman.

‘Let our Spider have a pocketful of tail corn to feed his blessed birds with. He give them half his lunch today. Dunno if you saw him feeding them?'

‘I never,' said Ephraim.‘I sent him home midday.'

‘That's funny. Kathie never said.'

‘I give him the afternoon off.“Have a little holiday”, I said.“Go on back to your house” .'

Spider's house, thought Tom, so that's where he went!

He said nothing of this to Kathie, but next day, as he and Spider set out together from the cottage, he said ‘You had the afternoon off yesterday, did you?'

Spider nodded, grinning.

‘Hol-i-day!' he said.

‘Where'd you go then?'

‘Spider's house! Good un!'

They parted, Spider towards the stables, Tom up the drove, dog at heel.‘He's happy, Moll,' said Tom.‘That's the main thing. Don't matter he's got no learning, don't matter he can't run and play games like other kids his age. Just so long as he's happy. Which he seems to be, whether 'tis cleaning harness or thinking he's a sojer, marching up and down banging his drum to frighten they croaks. Thank God he'll never be able to be a real sojer, no matter how long this war do last.'

T
hus far the War, although now a few months old, had not really impinged upon most people in Britain. Life in the Wylye Valley went on much as usual, and at the beginning of March 1940 Spider Sparrow once more took up his duties as crowstarver.

Percy had found work for him where he could throughout the winter, and now, with the sowing of both spring wheat and barley, there was once more need for his shouting and whistling and barking and banging, in his war against the ‘croaks'.

The spring corn was drilled on the lower grounds, not far from the lambing field, which meant that, though no longer able to use the shelter in the spinney, Spider could if needs be
take refuge in the shepherd's hut.

On pouring wet days (and there were many) he stayed in the lambing-pens and helped his father, and at midday and in the evening they ate together, in the hut, the food which Kathie brought out for the two of them. At suppertime she waited till Spider had finished his meal and then took him back home with her.

‘You've got to get your proper sleep,' she said.‘Your father has to do the best he can, this time of year, but you need yours, you're growing so fast.'

And indeed Spider was shooting up, ‘like a runner bean'Tom said. He did not put on much weight but only height, it seemed, and by his fourteenth birthday he was taller than his mother and not far short of his father.

For a birthday present they gave him two things, one because it would be useful, one because they knew, from little things he had said, he very much wanted.

The first was a big silver whistle that could hang round his neck on a lanyard.

‘You blow that when you need to rest your voice,' they said.‘That'll put the wind up the croaks,' and it did for a while, until of course the birds grew used to it, as indeed they'd grown used
to all Spider's noises. They flew up, and over to the next nearest piece of corn, and down again.

The other present was a knife. All the farm men carried pocket-knives, and Tom had a big one with a single curved blade which he used for paring the sheep's hooves, and for years now Spider had murmured ‘Good un' whenever he set eyes on it. So they bought him a really good knife with two long blades that folded into a stout handle, metal-capped at either end, the haft made from stag's horn. Let in to the stag's horn was a little plate, on which Tom had carefully scratched the initials J.J.S.

Kathie was not as happy about this present as Tom.

‘He'll cut himself,' she said.

‘He'll learn,' said Tom.

Both were right.

A day or so after his birthday Spider, whittling at a bit of stick with the blade of his new knife facing towards the hand in which he held the wood, cut the ball of his thumb quite deeply, as Kathie had said he would. But as Tom had said, he learned by that always to cut with the blade facing away.

On his actual birthday something rather unusual happened, as though in honour of the event.

They had just eaten their lunch in the hut, and Tom told Spider not to go back to his crowstarving but to stay a little while and help with what Tom suspected would be a difficult birth.

One way of denoting the age of a ewe was to describe her, when young, as a two-tooth, then a four-tooth, and later as full-mouthed.

This ewe was a big old full-mouthed Border Leicester, and Tom had already felt around and knew that she was carrying twins. He could feel forelegs and hindlegs muddled together, and now, putting a hand inside her, he began to manoeuvre the lambs, pushing one back, easing one forward, then turning it round till its forelegs were presented, and then, gently, drawing it.